| Henry
I and
the White Ship
- ad 1120 -
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Ten years before
he became king, William the Conqueror’s
youngest son Henry was helping to put down an
uprising in the Norman city of Rouen. It was
the late autumn of 1090, and after the fighting
had ended he invited the leader of the rebellion
to a high tower where he could look out over
the walled city and admire the beautiful river
and surrounding green fields and woods that
he had been trying to conquer. Then he personally
threw the man out of the window.
Henry I was thirty-two when he became King of
England, and had shown himself to be both decisive
and single-minded after the mysterious shooting
of his brother Rufus. Now he set about capturing
Normandy from his other brother, Robert Curthose.
In 1106 he defeated Robert at the Battle of
Tinchebrai, south of Bayeux – fought,
by coincidence, on 28 September, the date on
which William the Conqueror had landed his troops
in Sussex in 1066. So forty years later to the
day, William’s youngest son had reunited
his father’s cross-Channel empire. Henry
consigned his brother Robert to successive prisons
at Wareham, Devizes, Bristol and finally Cardiff,
where the unhappy Short-stockings would spend
the last months of his twenty-eight-year imprisonment
learning Welsh.
‘Woe to him that is not old enough to
die,’ declared Robert Curthose, who finally
expired in 1134 at the age of eighty, and whose
tomb can be seen today in Gloucester Cathedral.
‘Exchequer’ is a modern word that
comes to us from the reign of Henry I –
a king with a sharp eye for a penny. We have
seen him counting the silver his father gave
him on his deathbed for his inheritance, then
galloping straight to the treasury when his
brother died; he was the last king for four
hundred years shrewd enough to die without any
debts. Now, sometime after 1106, he introduced
the exchequer as a revolutionary new method
of government accounting and of centralising
royal power. Based on the Middle Eastern abacus
or counting-frame, the exchequer was a chequered
cloth like a chessboard. Counters were piled
on the different squares, rather as croupiers
handle chips on a gaming table. Twice a year,
at Easter and Michaelmas (the feast of St Michael
on 29 September), the sheriffs and royal officials
from the shires had to bring their money to
be checked and counted. To this day, the cabinet
minister in charge of the nation’s finances
is known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
and we all write and, if we are lucky, also
sometimes cash ‘cheques’.
By 1120 Henry I controlled a well-financed empire
on the two sides of the English Channel. He
travelled quite frequently from England to Normandy
in his own longboat or snecca, a Norse word
literally meaning ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’.
Merchants and nobles criss-crossed the channel
on these medieval equivalents of the cross-Channel
ferry, which, according to records from the
next century, charged two pence for an ordinary
passenger and twelve for a knight with his horse.
In tapestries and paintings of the time the
boats are depicted with striped sails, complete
with masts, rigging, tillers and anchors. Often
their prows were decorated with figureheads
of dragons and other beasts.
As Henry was preparing to set sail from the
Norman port of Barfleur at the end of November
1120, he was approached by a young seafarer,
Thomas FitzStephen. Thomas’s father, Stephen,
had been William the Conqueror’s personal
sea captain, taking him on the historic voyage
of 1066 to fight against Harold, and he had
ferried him back and forth across the Channel
to the end of his life. Now his son Thomas had
a newly fitted-out snakeship of which he was
particularly proud, the White Ship, and he offered
it to the King for his voyage.
Henry had already made his travelling arrangements,
but he suggested it would be a treat for his
son and heir, William, to sail on this state-of-the-art
vessel. William was just seventeen and a young
man on whom many hopes rode. He was popularly
nicknamed ‘the Aetheling’, the old
Anglo-Saxon title meaning ‘throne-worthy’
(see p. 65), because his mother Edith-Matilda
was descended from King Alfred’s royal
house of Wessex. Here was a part-Saxon heir
– some much-cherished English blood –
who would one day inherit the Normans’
empire.
Henry set sail for England, leaving William
the Aetheling to follow in the White Ship, with
many of the court’s most lively young
blades, among them William’s half-brother
Richard and his half-sister Matilda, two of
the numerous illegitimate children that Henry
had fathered outside his marriage to Edith-Matilda.
Spirits were high as the White Ship loosed its
moorings. Wine flowed freely among passengers
and crew, and as darkness fell, the princely
party issued a dare to the captain – that
he should overtake the King’s ship, which
was already out at sea.
The White Ship’s fifty oarsmen heaved
with all their might to pull clear of the harbour,
but as the vessel made its way through the night
its port side struck violently against a rock
that lay hidden just below the surface of the
water. This rock was a well-known hazard of
the area, uncovered each day as the tide ebbed,
then submerged at high tide. It can be seen
to this day from the cliffs of Barfleur, a dark
shadow lurking beneath the water. But Captain
Thomas FitzStephen, like his passengers, had
been drinking, and the ship’s wooden hull
shattered on the rock, the vessel capsizing
almost immediately. It was still close enough
to the shore for the cries and screams of its
three hundred passengers and crew to be mistaken
for drunken revelry. According to one account
the passengers on the royal snakeship heard
the cries behind them, but sailed on, unheeding,
towards England, through the night.
The White Ship was the Titanic of the Middle
Ages, a much-vaunted high-tech vessel on its
maiden voyage, wrecked against a foreseeable
natural obstacle in the reckless pursuit of
speed. The passenger list constituted the cream
of high society, cast into the chilly waters.
Orderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman chronicler
of the time, described the scene:
The rays of the moon lit up the world for about
nine hours, showing up everything in the sea
to the mariners. Thomas, the skipper, gathered
his strength after sinking for the first time
and, remembering his duty, lifted his head as
he came to the surface. Seeing the heads of
the men who were clinging somehow to the spar,
he asked, ‘The king’s son, what
has become of him?’ When the shipwrecked
men replied that he had perished with all his
companions, he said, ‘It is vain for me
to go on living.’ With these words, in
utter despair, he chose rather to sink on the
spot than to die beneath the wrath of a king
enraged by the loss of his son, or suffer long
years of punishment in fetters.
Orderic was wrong about the full moon. Sky tables
show that on 25 November 1120 the moon was new,
so the night must have been dark. But the chronicler
does seem to have gathered his information,
directly or indirectly, from the wreck’s
only survivor, a butcher from Rouen who had
jumped on to the White Ship to collect some
debts that were due to him from members of the
court. The butcher was saved from the exposure
that killed the others on that still, frosty
night by the thick, air-retaining ram-skins
he was wearing. Three fishermen plucked him
out of the water next morning and took him back
to dry land.
Over in England next day, King Henry became
puzzled when the White Ship did not dock or
even appear on the horizon. But the news of
the catastrophe reached the nobles at his court
soon enough, and everyone discovered they had
lost family and friends. Stewards, chamberlains
and cupbearers had all died – wives and
husbands, sons and daughters. As the court mourned,
no one dared break the dreadful news to the
King, and a whole day and night went by before
a young boy was finally pushed into the royal
presence, weeping, to throw himself at the King’s
feet. When Henry realised what had happened,
he fell to the ground himself, grief-stricken
at the news. He had to be shepherded away to
a room where he could mourn privately –
this stern Norman king did not care to display
weakness in public.
In the years following the death of his cherished
son, King Henry I governed his realm as busily
as ever, and also found time for his pleasures.
He founded England’s first zoo, where
he kept lions and leopards, and a porcupine
of which he was particularly fond. But he did
confess to nightmares that terrified him so
much that he would leap out of his bed and reach
for his sword. He dreamed that his people –
those who worked, those who fought, and those
who prayed – were attacking him. The Conqueror’s
shrewd, harsh, penny-pinching youngest son had
provided England and Normandy with firm government,
but the wreck of the White Ship meant that Henry
left no legitimate male heir to succeed him.
The drowning of William the Aetheling was not
just a personal tragedy – it would lead
to England’s first real and prolonged
civil war.
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